Kiss Your Homies Good Night

“Kiss your homies good night” is a phrase I’ve been known to shout drunkenly in the midst of genuine debates about politics. It acts as a summary; five words that explain everything we’ve discussed or debated.

More or less.

I first heard the phrase in the middle of a political theory course called “Feminism and Capitalism.” It was our first semester back on campus after being online for a year, and, collectively, we decided that memes were a legitimate addition to an academic discussion about gender and the economy. (Other incidents include copious references to the Barstool Sports podcast Call Her Daddy, but more on that another time.) We thought the “kiss your homies good night” meme made a good slogan for many of the conclusions we’d been drawing about the importance of care and the importance and validity of found family.

Obviously, the meme wasn’t created with the intention that a bunch of queer feminists would latch onto it. According to the Know Your Meme entry, the phrase first cropped up in a 2017 tweet by user @goodstuffcris and was probably popularized by an Urban Dictionary entry. This spawned endless memes, ranging from seemingly ironic insistence that it’s not gay to kiss your homies good night to genuine support of the action.

I, personally, fall into the second category. 

I think you should kiss your homies good night. 

But it doesn’t have to be literal. I’m not saying you need to appear in your best friends’ apartments every night and give them a big smooch on the forehead. But if you’re into it, and they’re into it, I will not stop you.

Kissing your homie good night can be checking in on them when they seem to be having a tough time. It can be making sure your vegetarian friend has something to eat. It can be having a specific cup for your friend who has trouble holding things. 

Kissing your homie good night is all about the acts of kindness, of care, that we do for each other that go beyond basic politeness. Something that makes those you’re interacting with stop and feel that little burble of warmth in their chest because you remembered, you cared. It’s those things that feel like the extra mile to the receiver, but don’t feel like anything at all to the giver. Just a moment of consideration and love that reinforces itself.

When we think politically about an idea like “care,” it’s often discussed in one of two contexts: Marxist feminists talking about care work or disability theory. For the Marxist feminists, the arguments that I see are centered around ideas of power and labor when someone (usually a woman) is performing a type of labor called “care work.” Typical examples of jobs requiring care work include nursing, sex work, or beauty services. The kinds of jobs where you the worker have to care (or at least pretend to care) about your client in order to successfully perform the job. In disability theory, the debates often look at legitimizing care (instead of valorizing independence) or analyze the complicated relationship between caregivers (aides, families, etc) and disabled people. 

These discussions overlap and interact, but I worry that an important part of the idea gets lost. Lately, I’ve been looking for values and desires that are common across all people and generations that aren’t necessarily the natural rights the Enlightenment supported. For example, it seems like humans have been adorning ourselves in various ways forever. We have bodies frozen in glaciers with tattoos and bodies buried with jewelry on (nearly) every continent. We also seem to want dignity. I think that treating people with dignity is treating them with care. Acknowledging the other person’s full humanity as well as your own forces you to consider them as an individual with their own concerns and needs. It’s not always easy and is frequently exhausting, but it might make life a bit more pleasant particularly in the service economy many of us exist in. 

Even if it is easy to feel totally isolated, we still live in communities. We interact with people, though maybe not on a daily basis. It can feel like there is no one around, but we still interact with someone, even if it’s just the Doordash driver. In these communities and interactions, we can care. I fear that Marxist feminism, in particular, can flatten these daily interactions. A Marxist feminist analysis of care work suggests that people providing care work are coerced into acting like they care to ensure their job security. They must pretend like they care to make sure they get tipped, don’t get fired, or avoid harassment. These are all very valid arguments. Your hair stylist might not actually want to talk about your pet cat, and she’s just pretending so you still give a good tip. But maybe the cleaner your rich aunt hires does genuinely appreciate the Christmas card exchange they do each year. Certainly, survival and money can tinge these interactions with aspects of coercion, particularly when we consider intimate situations like sex work, but genuine human connection can come from these interactions.

Disability theory can actually give us an interesting basis for interrogating care work. Many disabled people require human assistance to lead fulfilling lives. Maybe it’s someone to provide additional assistance at a workplace, maybe they need someone to help them get out of bed every day. Bonds can build between the paid care workers and the people who hired them, particularly if they work together regularly. There can still be power dynamics at play, particularly because the disabled person needs assistance. However, they are frequently the employer, and the worker needs a job. The mutual need can be frightening and does not ensure that workers provide good care or that disabled employers treat the workers well. Plus, many care workers, particularly in the healthcare industry, are taught to keep a distance between themselves and their clients or patients. In some cases, like a therapist, this is necessary. To be a useful therapist, they need to remain a neutral third party. In other cases, like home health aides, it can get a bit awkward. You spend eight hours a day helping someone, but you don’t get to know anything about them.

This distance, particularly in more intimate care settings, can feel dehumanizing. It can remove the “care” aspect from the work. The emotional reality of the relationship and workplace have been ignored because professional distance is more important.

Some disabled people and their carers have started advocating for new ways to approach this relationship. Yes, the employee still has all the physical responsibilities, but isn’t it more rewarding for everyone involved if you can enjoy each other’s company? Why can’t this be the kind of role where you play Mass Effect together in your spare time? Does sharing a hobby really impact one’s capacity to do a good job? 

Sometimes, we convince ourselves that we have to separate our feelings from ourselves. Maybe for work, maybe to fit heteronormative masculine norms. Tick which boxes fit the case for you. bell hooks brings up this idea in an essay in Teaching to Transgress. She discusses an instance when she was attracted to one of her seminar students. I’ll be honest, I was pretty weirded out at first, but bear with us. In her reflections on this course, she emphasizes that we are not brains in jars: we are brains in bodies that feel as well as think. There is no good way to permanently separate feelings, bodies, and brains because they all interact with each other and are linked. She found herself grading the student harshly as a way to deny her attraction, even though she viewed herself as above her feelings. You cannot deny part of yourself, especially your feelings. Genuine affection can grow in professional settings, even if norms say that it shouldn’t. In some cases, it may be better to acknowledge and move on from those feelings, like when you have a crush on one of your students. But, in others, it can make your job or your client’s life much better to acknowledge the mutual affection. Revel in the care.

Let the people in your life know you love them, even if it challenges established ideas about how we should act around each other. Obviously, don’t kiss your homie if they don’t want you to. But it’s important to challenge this idea that we can survive without feeling or that the care we receive is artificial because money is changing hands. Existing in capitalist heteropatriarchy can be an isolating experience, particularly for men. There is little room for men to show affection to their friends or build deep emotional bonds unless they’ve spent years breaking out of machismo and ideas of toxic masculinity. Practicing any demonstration of care is good for you and your friends.

Kissing your homies good night can also challenge our implicit hierarchies of relationships. I’m not advocating that being poly is right for everyone, but there are ways that relationship anarchy approaches love and care that can be useful for everyone. Ask yourself why you restrict some forms of non-sexual affection to some loved ones and not others. Why do you hug your partner and not your friends? We sometimes put artificial boundaries up because we think it’s socially incorrect to do something. But as long as you’re two consenting adults, why can’t you hug your best friend? Of course beyond that, literal physical affection is not for everyone, and maybe sending TikToks as a way of showing that you’re thinking of someone is more comfortable for you and your bestie. But you’re still finding a way to demonstrate that you care for that person.

Care is not a limited resource: you can share it with everyone because they can share it back with you. You contain so much capacity for love, and you need the love of others to keep going. Being the homie who is kissed is as important as kissing the homie. Care and love sustain all of us. No matter what it may seem like, there is a deep human need to have loved ones who can lean on each other. We are social creatures, after all.

I know some of us feel like that community is out of reach. I feel that way often, and I have more access to community than I ever did when I was younger. It can be difficult and scary to find, but you can find it. Personally, in-person acts of care are really important to me, but I am still so nourished by the virtual care I receive from friends who live far away when we video chat or stay up too late texting. For you and for me, it may take a certain amount of steeling our nerves for what feels like will be inevitable rejection. Sometimes people don’t want to be your homie whom you can kiss good night, but sometimes they do. And when they do, it can feel so wonderful.

So I’ll be here, with my army of memes, trying to normalize kissing your homies good night.